America's Addictions

This coming Monday evening, George Bush is addressing the nation on the important subject of immigration reform. It has been said that he will announce a plan to station national guard units along the border with Mexico to "secure the border" from illegal immigrants. An economic 'Berlin Wall' if you will. However, the Berlin Wall was built to keep people in; basically turning half of that city into a prison. Many other walls have been built throughout history: Hadrian's wall, The Great Wall of China, even a palisade wall of tall timbers along what is now known as Wall St in New York City. These walls were all built for protection against marauding native peoples or warrior tribes. What are our walls protecting us from, the economic devastation of cheap labor?

All this recent wringing of hands over the issue of illegal immigration reminds me of worries over another unwanted import from south of the border. The 'war on drugs' was and is fought to suppress the supply, just as building a fence and stationing soldiers on the border is done to suppress the supply of cheap labor. Similarly, much of the blame for the two problems lies with the demand half of the equation. Just as Americans have a demand or an addiction for drugs, they also have a demand, even an addiction, for cheap labor. Without the cheap labor that immigrants - documented or not - provide, almost everything would cost more. Do you eat at restaurants? I can guarantee you that your dirty dishes are washed by an immigrant and there's a good chance that your food is prepared and cooked by one as well. Do you shop for food? Purchases in the produce and meat departments will be made easier because of the cheap labor that immigrants provide. Have you bought a house in the last 5 or 10 years? That house was made more affordable because of the cheap labor pool of immigrants, legal or not. Immigrants, build our houses, mow our lawns, wash our dishes, even babysit our children. These people who hardly ever receive benefits or workplace protections, are hard working, decent people who simply want a better life for their children and they're being turned into enemies of the state. Sadly, a lot of this attitude comes from the fact that, though they enjoy the bounties of this cheap labor pool, many Americans want these people to disappear when they finish work. To disappear from our neighborhoods and towns and their children not be in the same schools with ours.

I work in a hundred year old downtown Manhattan skyscraper that has windows about four by eight feet in size that can be opened. About a month ago, a crew of workers, who I will assume were immigrants, came around to wash the windows. The man who washed the window in my office quickly washed the inside of the window. Next, my stomach dropped as I watched him, with no safety harness, climb out of the window and stand on a 1 foot wide ledge to wash the outside of the window, 150 feet above the street. Then I realized that he would be repeating this procedure perhaps more than a hundred times in a week, maybe a few thousand times in a year. All this for how much money? Probably just enough to be able to simply afford to feed and shelter himself and his family, or to send a couple of hundred dollars back to his family in their home country. These people are the bad guys? What about the maintenance company that's charging the building management thousands of dollars for this service and paying these people a fraction of that? This kind of thing is exploitation, pure and simple, and it happens everywhere in this country, everyday. Furthermore, the average American doesn't care.

People don't make the connection when they have their "fashion line" that collectively, they are the real reason that countries such as Colombia are practically owned and operated by violent drug cartels. Similarly, when someone hires the lawn care service to cut their grass for $30 a week, which then turns around and pays the immigrant who actually does the work $5, they collectively are one of the millions of Americans responsible for the current 'immigration crisis'. If this person has a teenage son at home who isn't told that it's his job to mow the lawn or simply won't, illegal immigration is the least of that person's problems.